Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (6 page)

Make sure to show the scale — how many feet in one inch — on the map. To get the detail you want for your permaculture plan, you may have to tape pieces of graph paper together. If your map is bigger than what you can copy on a copy machine, fold it and copy the pieces. You can tape those pieces together later, maybe on a backing of poster board. If you are copying your map in pieces, while you are making copies of the original plan at 100 percent to have an exact copy, make some smaller ones. Figure out what size you need so the resulting pieces will all fit on a standard size sheet of paper. Cut out what you need from the smaller copies, tape them on their new size paper, and make copies of that. You can make many sizes to play with. The more familiar you are with the copy machines at your office supply store, the better. You can always ask the employees to make the different size copies for you, but it is good to learn to do it yourself.

An 8½ × 11 size is nice to put in your notebook. You might want a larger size with color added (I use colored pencils) to put in a poster sized frame to hang on the wall. If you don’t have a map that shows the whole of your property, you will always be leaving something out in your mind. It also helps to see things in proper proportion to everything else on your property. You could cover copies of your garden map and permaculture plan with clear contact paper. Using wipe-off markers, you can have fun thinking up new plans. When you come up with something you like, draw it on one of those extra copies you made. Your family members might even want to get involved with that.

Figure 2.7. Base Permaculture Map for Sunfield Farm

Leave a wild spot on your property when you are planning. That would be an area that is left alone and not cultivated. If you are living where “wild” might be frowned upon, some bushes or a tree with bushes will do. Anywhere that is not messed with too often will provide habitat for beneficial insects. Those bushes could be something that flower early, providing nectar for the bees. (Having a perennial flower bed could also fill this niche.) If your neighbors live close and have phobias about insects, maybe it might be best not to mention attracting bees and bugs.
Wild areas help to maintain diversity. If they connect from one property to another they become wildlife corridors — highways for the wildlife. Not cultivating from property line to property line is a start. Some communities plan for undeveloped space. Unfortunately, sometimes residents do not recognize the value of those areas.

The base permaculture map of our place, Sunfield Farm, is shown above (
Figure 2.7
). This is the starting point of all the plans and only shows the property lines, fences, and buildings. At times I’ve made larger maps of portions of this map to show more detail when planning projects. I’ve done that for each of the gardens, the backyard, the back pasture area, and the barnyard. If you own your house you may have a copy of the plot plan that resulted from the survey that was done when you moved in. If you are not skilled at map making you could just use that as your base map.

3

Crop Choices

I
F YOU ALREADY HAVE A GARDEN
, you already have a list of favorite crops you want to grow. In developing your plan for a sustainable diet, you will want to consider crops that will grow the most food in the least space. John Jeavons and the folks at Ecology Action in California have done much research in that area and have documented their work in Jeavon’s book
How to Grow More Vegetables
.
¹
That book will be a helpful resource, in addition to this book, for this journey. Their gardening method is called GROW BIOINTENSIVE®. When you see it written in all capital letters like that, you know that all eight elements of the method are being followed. Those elements are deep soil preparation, use of compost, intensive planting, companion planting, carbon crops, calorie crops, open-pollinated seeds, and the whole system. I have been studying GROW BIOINTENSIVE for some time and think of all those things as best management practices for any garden.

According to Jeavons, if you were to eat only what you grew in your garden, you would need to give serious attention to getting enough calories, protein, and calcium. Most likely, your diet would include other local foods; occasionally some not-so-local foods; and some animal
products, which we’ll talk about later. But for now, let’s suppose that everything in your diet is from your garden.

Growing Calories

With calories being the biggest limiting factor if all your nutrient needs were to come from your garden, we’ll take a look at that first. The foods on Jeavons’ list of crops producing the most calories in the least space are garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, parsnips, potatoes, salsify, and sweet potatoes. In my garden, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and garlic are important crops. I have not taken the time to learn the nuances of leeks, parsnips, and salsify. Jerusalem artichokes were given to me many years ago by my friend Chester. It is one of his favorite foods. Although they haven’t become a staple at our table, I cook them occasionally and use them in ferment. They are great to dig through the winter, and with Chester’s encouragement, continue to be a part of my garden. I planted them at home and in the college garden where I was teaching. As a result, my students took some home to plant. When the deer ate Chester’s plants I was able to give some back to him. Being generous with what we have always pays dividends in the long run. An aspect of a sustainable diet is making sure of our supply. We can do that by sharing seeds and plants so more people are growing them.

Potatoes will give you the most calories per square foot planted of anything you will grow. Eating a diet of only potatoes could be toxic due to an excess of potassium. On the other hand, if you need potassium, eat more potatoes. Having fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, in your diet could help with detoxification.
²
In
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
, Weston A. Price wrote about the Quechua Indians of Peru who ate mostly potatoes dipped in a slurry of kaolin clay.
³
The practice of eating earthy substances, such as clay, is called
geophagy
. Eating certain kinds
of clay with wild potatoes was a practice of the Indians in the American Southwest and in Mexico, as well as those living in the Central Andean Altiplano.
⁴
The clay would have helped rid the body of toxins. Of course, today’s varieties are not necessarily the same as those early wild potatoes. Studying indigenous diets is interesting if you want to grow all your own food, but it is important to recognize all aspects of what those earlier populations were eating and how they were eating it. Our culture has lost some of the practices that were important in bringing food to the table. Sometimes they are the keys that we need to be successful in our endeavors. I’m not advocating eating clay with your potatoes, but offering an understanding of how a culture might have subsisted on a large quantity of the varieties that were available to them.

Sweet potatoes are one of the most nutritious foods you can grow.
⁵
In our area we plant Irish potatoes in the spring and harvest them in the summer. Sweet potatoes grow in the hot months and are harvested in the fall, just before frost. They are even easier to keep than Irish potatoes, since exposure to light doesn’t turn them green. They can usually sit in a box or basket in the corner of your house all through the winter until you need them. Sweet potatoes may produce a little less per 100 ft
²
than potatoes, but have a few more calories per pound.

Garlic is a good calorie producer in a small space. We don’t eat it in the quantities that we do potatoes, and for good reason, but it only takes a little garlic regularly in your diet to keep you healthy. There was a woman who visited the farmers market when I sold there. She was in her nineties at the time and told me she took no medications and she ate garlic daily. She also credited being active in her church to her secret of longevity. Over one hundred years old now, she is still kicking around and I see her picture in the paper now and again, celebrating her age and spirit.

As for leeks, parsnips, and salsify, you’ll have to look to others for guidance on those crops. One of those folks would be John Seymour, author of
The New Self-Sufficient Gardener
. Although he is no longer on this earth, his writings continue to guide many people along this path. Parsnips, leeks, and salsify are much bigger crops in the UK, where Seymour is from, than here in Virginia. At the end of the winter, if you
still have parsnips in the ground, dig them up and make wine. Directions are in his book.

Even if you aren’t growing all your own food, being able to a make a filling meal occasionally, with only ingredients from your garden, is satisfying in many ways. Jeavons lists peanuts, soybeans, dry beans, cassava, and burdock as crops that can give you a lot of calories in a small amount of food eaten, but those calories take more space to produce than potatoes. I know that cassava is a staple crop in tropical areas,
⁶
but I know nothing about burdock. If you are going for a sustainable diet, where you are planted on this earth will determine what you are growing and eating. I’ll address the legumes (peanuts, soybeans, dry beans) for their protein importance.

Growing Protein

All vegetables contain some protein. If you concentrate on growing and eating the calorie crops I just mentioned, you will be getting a lot of protein. You will also be eating a lot of food per day. Beans and peanuts, good to combine with grains in your diet, have a lot of calories in a small amount of food but at the cost of space in the garden. Grains also produce lots of calories per pound of food but not so many per square foot in the garden, although they have the big advantage of producing biomass for compost making and mulching. When it comes to protein, beans do not contain all the amino acids we need, but they don’t have to. Nature has conveniently provided the amino acids that beans are lacking in grains, and vice versa. Including both beans and grains in your diet gives you what you need. One needs only to look at traditional diets to find examples of this — tortillas and beans, beans and rice, cornbread and beans. Even good old peanut butter on whole wheat bread is an
example. Animal products have all the amino acids. Eating only beans or only grains would leave you lacking. Eating both beans and grains, particularly with the addition of even a small amount of milk, meat, or cheese, assures you are meeting your body’s requirements for protein. Eating a varied diet allows you to gather those amino acids from many sources.

Favas are highly recommended at Ecology Action
⁷
both as a diet crop (beans to eat) and as a source of green biomass for compost making. Be aware that some people are allergic to fava beans. When I tried to grow favas at my place in Zone 7,
⁸
the blooms would fall off prematurely during spring hot spells and didn’t yield many beans. I tried pinto beans in my garden, but couldn’t get much of a yield of dry beans. Pintos are popular in the gardens at Ecology Action. The climate is different there in Willits, California, with hot days, cool nights, and little humidity. Here in Virginia we have hot days, hot nights, and high humidity. I began growing cowpeas after a number of dry years. Traditionally, cowpeas, also known as Southern peas, are a good crop for my region. According to the Master Charts in
How to Grow More Vegetables
, cowpeas produce less than many other varieties of beans. The charts are a good place to go for information and guidance, but ultimately, you have to try different things and find out what does best in your area. It turns out that cowpeas are in a different bean family than other dry beans and the bean beetles that bother those other beans aren’t interested in cowpeas. Furthermore, my plants yielded from 12 to 20 seeds per pod! Cowpeas have become my dry bean of choice to grow for food for our table. In my own chart of yields, cowpeas outshine pinto beans, by far.